GU Outdoors aims for more student involvement

In 1998, the inaugural year of Gonzaga Outdoors (then called Gonzaga-Out-Of-Bounds), the club's activities consisted of 11 events, including a few trips to the local climbing gym Wild Walls, a ski trip and a 007 Golden Eye Tournament on the Nintendo 64 game console.     

Last year the GU Outdoors office ran 42 events, none of which involved James Bond, including several hikes, rafting trips and biking adventures. GU Outdoors has come a long way since its first year and hopes to continue to grow in the upcoming year. For the 2010-2011 school year, GU Outdoors has 25 adventure guides to plan activities in five different categories: snow, water, hiking, climbing and biking.

"We are trying to focus most of the resources to those guides planning trips so we'll have a bunch of activities coming from each of these areas," junior David Dunphy said.

Dunphy, along with senior Sean Williams and sophomore Andrew Opila, will head GU Outdoors this year.   

"I'm really excited to add a new variety of events," Willians said. "We're offering events to introduce students to new sports and on-campus screening of films."

The GU Outdoors office has plans for a hike to Scotchman's Peak on Saturday. Officials hope this hike will provide an opportunity for GU Outdoors to embrace various aspects of its mission at Gonzaga.   

"We're going to a place that's a proposed wilderness, so we're going to talk about what this land is and why it's valuable," Dunphy said. "We're giving people an opportunity to go hiking and see an area they haven't necessarily seen or to try a new activity, and we are giving student guides the opportunity to learn about building a community."

  GU Outdoors is also offering a rafting trip on the Clark Fork River in Montana on Sept. 10-11.

According to Dunphy, GU Outdoors consistently strives to incorporate and educate participants on important nature issues such as forest preservation.   

"We are creating a group of students that will advocate for places to recreate," Dunphy said. "The hope is not just learning a new activity or new skill but to really be active in protecting the lands we show them for their lifetime. Hopefully when they go out and have a career someplace they will advocate for the lands near their home, too."

GU Outdoors began that educational mission on Gonzaga-Out-Of-Bounds (GOOB), the annual pre-orientation trip in which 75 incoming freshmen were taken to Montana for a week of rafting, hiking and biking.  

"GOOB was extreme as always," Dunphy said. "This year we were able to talk about the centurial fires that had gone through there so we were able to tie in some natural history to what is always the community building of the freshmen class."

"We had a really good time on GOOB this year," Williams said. "We offered the freshmen a powerful opportunity to build community through common experience."

GU Outdoors also has weekly mountain bike rides and geo-cashing trips planned for September.

"We're going to be busy," Dunphy said. "Get as many people out there as we can. That's always the intention."

In order to further enable students to get out and explore the wild, GU Outdoors has lowered rental rates on all of its gear.

"When we were looking at our mission statement last year we were thinking about how we can run a rental program that sustains itself, but also gets more students outside, so we just adjusted rates where necessary," Dunphy said. "We figured we'd make a pack and sleeping bag and pad cheaper so more people try backpacking. That's what that gear is there for anyways."

In order to get more students utilizing its bike and ski repair shop in Lower Crosby, GU Outdoors is offering an annual membership to the shop so students can tune their skis and bikes, Dunphy said. They also have a resource center with trail books and a computer dedicated to trails.com, which allows students to access hundreds of guidebooks.

Students interested in getting involved at GU Outdoors can stop by the the office, put their name on the club's e-mail list at the club fair, or join the group on the University's club website "Gonzaga Community."  

"We plan activities for people of all skill levels, so we really want people to try something new," Dunphy said. "I think that's a big part of college and a big part of learning about yourself is getting outside that comfort zone, hiking a couple miles, or going down a raft."